New arena for disney

As part of celebrations for the 10th anniversary of Disney's Wide World of sports Disney has partnered up with Jostens Inc. and announced the building of a 70,000 plus square foot arena. The Jostens center will have more than 44,800 square feet of competition space, 6 basketball courts, 12 volleyball courts, 2 roller hockey rinks, 4 locker rooms, 2 conference rooms and 2 officials' rooms. It will house many events like that of the Milk house, the current indoor arena. This arena gives Disney the ability to host double the events and even host two events at once! Since the Milk house is booked 50 out of 52 weekends a year this will bring even greater adventure to Disney and the surrounding Orlando area.

New Disney Website for parents

Disney recently announced that they are launching a new webpage geared towards parents, specifically, moms. In the day of technology, moms are increasingly turning to the internet to answer questions from what to do with a runny nose to what to do with a broken bone. Disney's site is geared towards parents to give parents a reliable source to access any information that they need. The site is not designed to promote Disney or its products in anyway. The site was announced on March 13th and will remain in testing stages until the summer. The only money that Disney hopes to make off of this site is from ads that are placed next to the search engine. Hopefully this site will give parents a safe place to go when they feel lost in questions.

Hotel Condo Conversion Boom

As many as 15,000 hotel condo conversions could come on the market by 2010, and it could drastically change the vacation home and hotel landscape in orlando. These hotel condo conversions are very unique in that they are individually owned just like a condo or vacation home, but they are set in a hotel setting with a lobby, room service, restuarants, and most are affiliated with a national hotel brand.

Historically hotels have had 1 owner or one corporation which owned all the hotel rooms, now the landscape is going to change by having multiple owners in a hotel. Here is where I see a huge problem for travelers to Orlando in the near future, with having so many different owners the upkeep on most of these properties is going to be a major task. The reason most of the hotels are changing to condo conversions is that the single owner or corporation is not getting the return on their investment that they were hoping for when they bought the property. So now they are flipping these properties into condo conversions and making 50% or more on their money plus releaving themselves of their headace. The problem is that when a corportation could not make the numbers work now they are selling each room for almost double what they paid for it, what makes the new owners think they can do any better.

Can you imagine what is going to happen when an investor of a property purchases a unit for around $125,000, and after expenses of the house keeping and hotel staffs the owner is actually losing money each month. How willing do you think he is going to be to put money back into the unit? The sad truth about the hotel business is that if you do not put money into a hotel they will deteriate quickly.

Orlandovacation.com currently does not work with any hotels which are condo conversions and we do not see this being part of our product mix in the near future. However, with so many new conversions coming onto the market we will probably work with a few, but we will make sure that all properties we sign up meet our high standards.

Orlandovacation.com will be expanding

We are pleased to announce that Orlandovacation.com will be expanding our website in the very near future. We have put a lot of time and effort into the shopping.orlandovacation.com subcategory, and we hope the Disney enthusiest out thier will truely enjoy all the exciting things they will be able to buy online.

We will be selling mickey mouse ears with names ingraved on them, Jeff Lange DVD's, and Disney pictures from magicinpixels.com. Now that we have agreed on a mutually beneficial agreement with our partners we should have the new items uploaded to our site within two weeks.

Citrus Bowl- Will Orlando keep it?

The Cotton Bowl in Dallas just announced that they are moving the bowl to a one billion dollar facility. WOW! Now the big question comes to Orlando, are we going to pay to upgrade the run down Citrus Bowl or just wave good bye to the once proud football event.

I for one would be very sad to see it go, not only because I am a huge college football fan, but because I think it would hurt Orlando tourism during the busiest month of the year. Everybody knows that Christmas time is prime season to visit Orlando and Disney World, and it is always a good for Orlando hotels to get one final tourism boost before they close their annual books. If you consider that the Citrus Bowl brings in 45,000 fans from across the nation this will directly hit Orlando hotels and the City of Orlando where it hurts, in the pocket book.

Orlandovacation.com new 75 page Disney Guide

Now when you book an Orlando hotel or an Orlando vacation pool home we will send you a FREE 75 page Disney Guide. Yes, we have updated our guide to included 75 pages, we do this to help our clients get the most out of their vacation.

There are other sites that are out their that offer Disney Guides, but why would you want to pay $30 or more on a guide when we can give it to you for FREE.